HOW TO SLEEP.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 199, 23 August 1930, Page 11 (Supplement)

HOW TO SLEEP.

DOCTORS STUDY POSITIONS.

CAMERA SNAPS DUEING NIGHT.

Elaborate experiments to determine the best position during sleep have just been concluded at the University of Pittsburg following years of observation on 150 healthy people, writes a- mcdieal correspondent of the "Evening Standard.'? Some doctors advise sleeping on the back, others are strongly opposed to this. Some recommend that people should sleep on the abdomen or on the right side, while the preponderance of expert opinion is that in any case one should sleep with the spinal column straight, and the legs extended. Now, by an ingenious apparatus, the postures assumed by normal persons during a night's sleep have been photographed, and the time occupied in each posture recorded by a clock which the camera photographed at the same tiihc. A camera was arranged so that it automatically took a picture of the sleejuer when he first lay down, a second picture immediately after he had ceased to stir, a third when he moved again, and so on. The subjects for a night or two wore a bandage over the eyes to shut out the light; but . after three or four nights they grew accustomed to the conditions and discarded the bandage. Bedclothes were dispensed with and the sleeping chamber was artificially warmed and ventilated. The results obtained by this elaborate and prolonged investigation justify all the time and trouble involved, for what do We find? The most restful night's sleep in the great majority of those photographed was characterised by more than a dozen different postures. (Any position held for less than a minute was not recorded.) All these positions were taken night after night in fairly regular sequence, and it is established that those which are held for the longest periods are contorted —that is, the spinal column is bent. There is no complete relaxation of the muscular system during sleep, as was commonly supposed, but positions appear to be taken up to relieve those previously held, as well as to relieve those parts of the body used most strenuously during the day. It is now proved that no healthy person ever sleeps in one or even two positions during the night. Consequently, any advice given on the way one shouW lie during sleep is useless. To get a healthy person to spend the night in one position would entail strapping him to a frame! Besides these records of healthy people, pictures of tuberculous patients, nerve cases, drug addicts, and young children have been taken. It is more than probable that the posture during sleep in illness may prove to be a valuable means of helping the physician to find, a cause for some of the more obscure diseases of the present day.